Episode 21: Spring Equinox: Redefining Wealth

The Spring Equinox invites us to embrace new growth, ideas, paradigms and concepts. Current events compel us to redefine wealth to usher in an Agrarian Renaissance in your local community. What resources/assets can you contribute?

Here is the audio version on Spotify

More at:
 www.thetippingpoints.net

Seeds & Tools - https://www.siskiyouseeds.com/

Show notes:

Check out the following books by Ursala Le Guin:
The Dispossessed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
Alway Coming Home
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home

Check out more at:

www.dontipping.com

Courses & Farm Tours: https://www.siskiyouseeds.com/pages/workshops-and-tours

Seeds & Tools - https://www.siskiyouseeds.com/

Growing Tips https://www.siskiyouseeds.com/blogs/news/

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello. I'm Don Tipping, and here is another installment of the Agrarian Renaissance podcast. And increasingly, my belief and inquiry into the idea that Renaissance is the appropriate response to collapse is being affirmed. And I would attribute this to the blessing that it is to work on the land and be outside and just witness the ongoing cascade of the seasons and the cycles of nature. And I am talking to you today on the spring equinox, March 20th of 2026. So this seemed like a worthwhile time to take a moment out of my farm responsibilities, which are many at this time of year, and delve into what is the significance of the equinox and this time of year, when some ancient peoples believe this was a new year moment. I would imagine that was predominantly in the temperate latitudes, when you were either in a northern latitude, like we are here at 42 degrees 42.2 north latitude in southwestern Oregon. Or perhaps you're in the southern hemisphere and you're experiencing on this day a fall equinox, like my friends down in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and the like Tasmania. Anyhow, if we think about the equinox, it is, I don't think the ancients it would have been quite difficult to ascertain exactly the moment of the equinox. It would require a lot of math. And so it was more of a period. And when I look at the Chinese New Year, which is the first new moon, and you know, it's usually like late January or sometime in February, and the Tibetan New Year, which sometimes is the same as the Chinese other years, it's a month later. And also like ancient um druidic lore that saw February 1st, you know, which the Catholic Church renamed Candlemass, as the the new, the the birthing of the new year. And so you can think about this time of year as when the crocuses are flowering, the pussy willows are blooming, um, various migratory songbirds are coming back. Uh here on our farm, we're seeing the very first dandelions bloom, and the peaches and early plums are blooming, along with all kinds of annual seasonal weeds like chickweed and veronica and um you know, hedge nettle and henbit and that type of thing are all flowering. You could you could it the feeling that the earth is waking up is is truly palpable. And so if we go back to you know the the Greek-Roman astrology, the equinox also represents the the start of the calendar year, the solar year of the 12 signs of the zodiac. So today is the first day when the sun moves into the constellation of Aries, according to, you know, the traditional full house system or tropical house system of Western astrology. Those of us who are a little more scientifically oriented know that there's been uh, you know, they didn't get their math so right because they didn't have telescopes back then. And the reality is uh it doesn't quite correlate with that nice 12 equal signs. And for those of you that are not well versed with this, uh Western astrology basically assumes that the 12 constellations each occupy one-twelth of a 360-degree arc, so that means they represent 30 degrees of uh you know that quadrant or pi wedge of the sky. When the actuality is that the constellations have different sizes because of the uh stars that amalgamate into what the ancients named as the individual constellation. So for instance, I think Virgo's 37 degrees of an arc, where Libra is only 12 degrees of an arc. So Sediral astrology, which the Vedic system is based off of, as is the biodynamic planetic calendar, looks at the unequal constellation size. So it's more about the directly observable phenomenon. However, humans are highly susceptible to believing in mythology in a variety of ways. And one of my favorite quotes comes from the poet, author uh Michael Mead, and he says that mythology is a lie that tells the truth. And so you can think of all the myths that we as individuals or collectively as society believe in, that we uh you know ascribe a lot of value and weight to. So just to start with this time of year and a little background, because I think I know I learned through repetition. And this time of year, as the wildflowers are blooming and I am doing various farm tours and that kind of thing, I you know, say, oh, there's shooting star, there's fawn lily, and I repeat the Latin name out loud, and in doing so, now 30 years into doing this, I it helps me memorize them so I know that what that is. If I don't, then I don't. You know, shooting star is Dodicathion de Glacii in our area, uh, named after uh David Douglas, but it wasn't David Douglas that discovered it, it was Thomas Menzies, because those of you that know botany, the uh agreed upon etiquette is that you don't name a plant species after yourself, you name it after a colleague whom you admire. So David Douglas and Thomas Menzies were some of the early botanists here in the Pacific Northwest. So we have a lot of uh plants with their last name Latinized with the double eyes uh put at the end. Um many of the plants are named, they named after each other, which is like maybe half ego. It's not full ego, uh, because they could have given a more descriptive name, which would be perhaps more appropriate. I like to think that I would have done it that way. You know, if something had a color or something, I would I would you know incorporate that into the Latin so that in the future people aren't thinking of the person that found it, because obviously the native indigenous people here knew all about those plants long before David Douglas and Thomas Menzies ever made it out here to Western Oregon. Anyhow, I digress. So Aries. We are now today, the sun moved into the constellation of Aries, and ironically, uh, we have some other planets in the constellation of Aries. Uh today, Mars is in the constellation of Aries, and Aries is actually uh Mars, and that's the rulership of it. You know, so Mars is a you know Martian or it's a god of war. Uh, but also anyone who's paying attention to these kinds of things also knows that Neptune is in the constellation of Aries for the next long chunk of time, because Neptune takes a really long time to get around the sun, and Saturn is in Aries for the next two and a half years or so. So we have what's called a conjunction or a stellium of planets, including the sun, that is in Aries. Um Aries means ram in Latin. So that's the symbol, the glyph for Aries is that you know a line that comes up with two kind of curling hooks that are like the horns of a ram. So according to the uh Greek myth, there was a ram that was destined for sacrifice that was rescued by Phryxius. Let's see how my Greek is here, and Helle uh from sacrifice, and Zeus, acknowledging their good deed, put it in the sky as a symbol, and that became Ares, the ram in the sky. And obviously, we know uh Jason and the Argonauts and the search for the golden fleece is another element of this. But what I find interesting is that Aries represents the first uh sign of the zodiac, the initiative, and then you know the cycle of the 12 going around. There's a whole story in that. So Ares not only embodies a ram and what that represents, it represents vitality, it represents the a new start. And we can feel that in this time of year of spring. And it's a good time to harness those energies and be inspired with new ideas. And in that, too, there is uh the various um tonalities within the astrological uh constellations. And so Aries is a cardinal sign, and that represents initiative, new things, new starts. So you can feel that all around you. Um, but it's also a uh a Martian, uh, you know, a it's ruled by Mars and the god of war. And we can feel right now war is around. There's there's tons of news about all that. Uh I'll be relating to that tangentially, but I am not a uh military strategist nor a political uh analyst, so I'm I'm gonna steer clear of all that. However, I do see there is a a shift to a new type of order. We are now in this uh kind of a, you know, the term for a long time was new world order. And I think the new world order is chaos because the old systems are breaking down, and we you don't get handed a new system right away. Uh you have to stay in that limeral state where no one knows whether it's this or that. We're in that in-between space. Uh and this isn't just here in the United States or the English-speaking countries of the world. This is, it seems like globally. And I think we've had long enough with smartphones and the internet to realize, in a way, the party's over and the promise of AI, in my view, is largely a hollow promise, although it's going to do a whole bunch of destruction. So, again, there's that chaotic element of all these things in Aries. And Aries, in a lot of ways, is the toddler that just runs in and not necessarily the bull in the China shop, but a ram. You know, it's forceful, it's energetic. And we can feel this, that there's uh disruptive things happening in every element of society right now. And for those of us that have gotten really used to, uh, you know, I'm a Gen X, and I think the boomers in Gen X in large part have gotten used to a real steady state in ecology and society, whereas the younger generations have saw the early stress fractures of capitalism faltering or uh the destructive, uh disruptive elements of technology and um you know, Gen Z even more so, and as younger people who are born into a world of social media and smartphones and the internet and AI, uh, they they don't have that grounding in enjoying a quiet sunrise or listening to the sound of bumblebees that I think those of us that are a bit older do. And I think in this, this new chaos is just the uncertainty that um the other night we had a group of us sitting around a fire and we were talking about how as you know, war and the price of oil and then as that ripples through society in terms of uh transport, the cost of food, fertilizer, and all uh uh electricity, everything. You know, we live in a petro-dominated society, whether you like it or not. That's just the fact of the matter. But for those of us that have been homesteaders, farmers, back-to-the-landers for a long time, we are recognizing our confirmation bias uh and implicit bias in um celebrating collapse of various uh institutions and systems that have been largely destructive to indigenous peoples, um, wild species, ecosystems, and this kind of thing. However, being right doesn't mean you win a prize. We will still suffer uh with more expensive fuel prices, electricity, food, every everything that's gonna ripple through, and we'll see, you know, three months from now, six months from now, a year from now, uh a new paradigm. Uh just like if we think back to after Hurricane Katrina, gas prices spiked up, but they never really came down very much. Or I remember a drought in California where the price of almonds went from being cheap to really expensive. It came down a little bit, but never came back down to the baseline. And I think we are in a new normal, but that new normal is chaos. And I've been reading lately the uh book by Ursula Le Guin called The Dispossessed, and it explores a fascinating um thought experiment of a breakaway civilization from Earth, where they colonize two different planets as a binary system. Uh, in one planet, they choose to just replicate the Earth-based systems of uh democratic political institutions, capitalism, gender hierarchies, these kind of things. And the other planet, they explore anarchy, uh, anti-capitalism, like sharing economy, and the fact that in a paradigm where you have uh machines, why uh is a man viewed as stronger than a woman if a woman can hop in a bulldozer or a backhoe or a car or a truck and have the same power uh access as anyone? So I've been fascinated by that because I think sometimes it's really, as I've heard the quote said before, that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. And I say this as someone who is a business owner, uh who employs people and you know enjoys access to money and what it can do, the leverage that money can do, um, in terms of being able to run a farm or all these kind of things. Um whereas when I imagine all the work that I put into this, you know, basically my entire adult life and all my assets, of just moving into a share-based economy or a network-based economy where it's about the relationality rather than tokenizing every uh resource interaction asset. And so I that I want to bring in the idea, which I really think this is on the spring equinox uh moment. And as we move from the old world order to the new world order, which is actually disorder. It's not, we don't get to move right into the next thing. We're in a period of chaos, and that might last for a period of time. Uh, I don't think anyone actually knows. We'll know when it's done and we've moved into another steady state. If you're curious to explore that, I think the book Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin is a fascinating uh thought experiment case study in imagining what does this new steady state look like. Um and I think uh you know, I remember during COVID some funny cartoons of like, when did we move science fiction into current events, you know, in the bookstore, you know, in terms of like the sections, because it there's things every day that happen nowadays that to the old world order sound like science fiction, uh, whether it's Boston dynamic robots or whatever's happening in the news. So I think part of the meditation that's increasingly important for us in birthing this agrarian renaissance, which is like basically just a new way of doing things. And we're always gonna be agrarian because obviously we aren't gonna get people to eat bugs or lab-grown meat, or we're not all gonna become breatharians. So we're still gonna rely on our agrarian roots if we want to have this many people. It's gonna be a long time before we move back to hunter-gatherer societies. Uh, and we have a lot of ecosystem restoration to do before that point, uh, which we should be doing while we still have access to the bulldozers and the fossil fuels as much as possible and quit making messes. Um, so I think this this uh meditation, this thought experiment about redefining wealth is so important because as we uh are witnessing the current rug pull and the I think ongoing rug pull of the debasement of currency and also uh new stores of value. You know, we've seen recently the precipitous rise in value of gold and silver, which have been historic stores of value, but also new things like cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, which intrinsically is worthless in my view. But, you know, through speculation, people are able to uh convince a lot of people to put a lot of store of value in that. Where, in my view, I think we need to uh recognize what true health and wealth is, which is your health and uh vitality of the land leads to the vitality of the inhabitants, human and otherwise. So, in my view, obviously I'm a seed grower, so I I'm gonna put seeds up there high on my list of new asset categories. Uh, seeds are valuable and the ability, and they represent here at the spring equinox time the the ability to create new life, to disperse the potential of new life. Obviously, you need to bring together sun, soil, and water, and uh you know, some agricultural capacity in order to do something with that. But it's a good starting point, and you can't just make it up out of nowhere. So another uh asset category that I think in this redefining of wealth in this new paradigm that's going to be increasingly important is water, access to water, uh, water storage, clean water, water quality, um, and then this extrapolates it out into all kinds of things like rain water, even desalination plants. I've been hearing in this uh you know, Iran war uh effort, uh disaster cataclysm over there, that they may try and hit the desalination plants because much of the Middle East and all of that uh you know kind of castles made in sand that we see in Dubai and uh Doha and that kind of stuff all relies on uh imported food and desalination of salty water in order to meet the freshwater needs for all those people. So I think part of this movement from the old world order to the new world order, which in this period of chaos is we need to um look at filling sandbags with the sand instead of making castles made out of sand, which I think a lot of the techno-utopian AI optimist uh futurist models, they're in the castles made of sand, but that's they're very fragile unless you add some Portland cement to that sand. Uh but I don't see them doing that. It's all speculative. Where filling sandbags to, you know, as a metaphor to avert the disasters that are befalling human civilization and will continue to is where we should be applying our efforts. So back to water, and then I'm gonna move right into soil, you know. So sand is one of the elements of soil, uh, having healthy living soil and the and knowing how to do so and making infertile land fertile uh with organic techniques, whether that's cover cropping, uh rotational grazing, composting, uh remineralization, all of that is going to become an increasingly important skill set. And asset, having fertile, uh viable agricultural land. Um, obviously, food, I think food represents a lot of embedded energy, and that most of that embedded energy is fueled by petroleum at this point, whether it's the actual production, the diesel that's going into the tractors, the natural gas that's used to create the anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, and the um the transport, the storage, and the processing is all highly uh petroleum-dependent. And local food production is going to prove to be increasingly important, as is local food um storage, you know, cold storage, because we rely on refrigeration for a lot of things, but also the value added, turning cabbages and so on into sauerkraut and kimchi is going to be increasingly valuable, as is community, the people that know how to do this stuff, and who do you rely on? And I like to think of, you know, in the old school parlance, we used a Rolodex. And who was in your Rolodex? Did you have uh, you know, the various people that had the machinery, the know-how, the medical services, all those things to help you achieve this? And that's where I think the prepper mentality uh really falls apart, is you can't do all this yourself. So for myself, I've chosen to focus my building my skill set and the resources and assets that I can uh bring to my community in terms of seeds, knowledge. Uh, we've got a bunch of fruit trees and the ability of storing that fruit and distributing it. So fuel is going to be increasingly important. I'd much rather have hundreds of gallons of diesel and gasoline or uh solar production capacity than uh. Arbitrary digital numbers on some balance sheet that could evaporate with a rug pull in our financial system. So that, you know, has happened many times, but things like fuel is always valuable, even if that's firewood, you know, the ability of staying warm or using that firewood to boil maple sap into maple syrup or fire a still or what have you. Um that Promethean capacity is really important. Another thing, too, is is just capacity as a in general. Like, do you have an extra room in your house? Do you have a shed that you can store more uh dry goods, beans and rice and wheat and that kind of things, dried fruit, uh, or um, you know, house people that are refugees from some you know catastrophe that's happening somewhere. So building capacity is increasingly important. We recently had a a little neighborhood uh irrigation ditch meeting, and it got my son and I thinking about uh organizing a fire resilience plan uh before it's fire season, while still all green and lush and doing uh inventory mapping. So I just wanted to get us thinking about those things around redefining wealth as we move into this new spring equinox time, and you know, encourage us all to do that personal inventory of like what are you bringing to the table of the the stone soup of the building a new civilization, a new agrarian renaissance in this time of chaos. And most people in chaos are just gonna run around like chickens with their heads cut off. But I want to encourage each of you to be a resource, like it in and of yourself. There, that is an asset, your human capacity, your imagination, your creativity. So hopefully you gain something of benefit. Obviously, you can access seeds and tools through uh Cisq Seeds, and um hopefully we'll continue to build this network. I know I'm doing this work in my community. Um, I'll I'll put a link in the show notes for a nonprofit I work with that I jokingly, but only half jokingly, call our regenerative chamber of commerce in our river valley here. And I serve as a volunteer on the board of that of imagining how could it be better, asking good questions, listening, and then working together to get the ball rolling, to grow, to plant these seeds and grow them into a thriving, not just a vision of the future, but a tangible reality that harvests rainwater, builds soil, grows food, trains young people, and organizes resources for a thriving agrarian renaissance. So all blessings to each of you. Happy equinox, peace.